SACRAMENTO, Calif. – The basketball must’ve thought the rim was a hula hoop. It kept spinning and spinning, dancing with the fates of Duke and LSU, toying with them. It lingered up there, almost mischievous, stretching a moment with so much at stake.
Time stopped obeying. The seconds melted into each other. The tension made a short time feel exhaustingly long. Every eye in the Golden 1 Center seemed locked on that rim, waiting, hoping, fearing.
“I felt like I was in a dream,” Duke guard Ashlon Jackson said. “It was just playing back over and over again.”
Then it dropped. Chaos yielded to clarity. Jackson was the hero. Duke was the victor, 87-85, at the buzzer. LSU, admirably persistent, was a worthy winner that somehow lost. Over the past two weeks, the Women’s NCAA Tournament has witnessed plenty of drama, but this game trumped it all. For Duke, Jackson’s 3-pointer didn’t merely decide a game. It defined a season.
Jackson remembers beating the buzzer before. Her jumper had defied the shot clock or closed out quarters with flair. But until Friday night, she had never done anything like this. Never with a season hanging in the air. Never with the ball refusing to cooperate, showboating before surrendering to gravity.
“I’ve never had a game-winner,” Jackson said.
DUKE BUZZER-BEATER VS. LSU TO ADVANCE TO THE ELITE EIGHT 🚨
WHAT AN ENDING 😱 pic.twitter.com/gvqYaJ8gIe
— SportsCenter (@SportsCenter) March 28, 2026
It was no big deal, really. It only put Duke in the Elite Eight for the second straight season. It only came when it seemed like the pressure had gotten to the senior.
A few seconds earlier, Jackson stood at the free-throw line with Duke leading 84-83. The Blue Devils had an 11-point lead with 7:35 remaining, only to watch LSU go on the kind of relentless surge that coach Kim Mulkey’s teams are known for.
The Tigers didn’t panic. They pressed, attacked, believed. With 19.8 seconds left, Jackson had a chance to give her team a more comfortable cushion. She missed both free throws, however. For her career, she was an 82.1 percent foul shooter, but she missed them both.
On the next possession, LSU guard Mikaylah Williams hit her free throws and gave the Tigers the lead.
Jackson gave herself grace.
“I couldn’t really hang my head with that,” she said. “If I would have just gave in, everybody else will fall. I couldn’t just really do that. So I just had to stay the course.”
When Duke received one last chance, coach Kara Lawson didn’t make the moment complicated. She was turning to a woman who has played 138 games for Duke and meant much to Lawson’s skillful restoration of the program.
“There was no doubt who I was going to in that situation,” Lawson said.
And there was no doubt Jackson would embrace the responsibility. With 2.6 seconds left, she took an inbounds pass, gave a fake to avoid the scrambling defense of LSU guard Flau’jae Johnson and let hope fly. No hesitation. No second-guessing. No memory of those missed free throws.
“It was really simple in my mind,” Jackson said. “Just went. It was just that simple. Whenever my number was called, I had to deliver.”
Duke’s Ashlon Jackson (3) celebrates with Delaney Thomas (12) and Toby Fournier (35) after making the winning shot against LSU in their Sweet 16 thriller in Sacramento. (Ed Szczepanski / Imagn Images)
In a game that kept swaying, Jackson helped Duke separate chaos from collapse. After the Blue Devils surged to their double-digit lead early in the fourth quarter, LSU responded the way great teams do. The Tigers didn’t play with desperation. They opted for force. Possession by possession, they erased the deficit. The Blue Devils seemed close to unraveling. Lawson wouldn’t let them.
“It can weigh on you mentally late in the game when you squander a lead and the other team takes it,” Lawson said. “We stayed so strong in those huddles. All their eyes were on me, and we were very purposeful in what we wanted to do.”
She stayed true to that purpose, even after her team rocked the basketball world.
After the ball finally reached the bottom of the net, when the building went berserk and the Duke bench spilled onto the floor, Lawson didn’t have an initial reaction. She was as cool as former Villanova coach Jay Wright after Kris Jenkins won the 2016 men’s national title.
She walked toward Mulkey and stopped time. After a firm and deliberate handshake, they leaned toward each other and talked for a while, two competitors whose teams had maxed out on effort. It was an acknowledgment of Duke’s victory and LSU’s resistance. The teams didn’t stage a perfect game. They played a great one. And maybe the ball did those last-second shenanigans because it didn’t want a spectacular evening to end.
“In moments of victory or defeat, I think it’s really important to be respectful,” Lawson said. “We want to be a program that wins with class and loses with class.”
Later, Lawson stood at midcourt as the entire team stood around Jackson during a postgame ESPN interview. She took time for quiet reflection. She bent forward, placed her hands on her knees, and processed it all. She was quiet, still, introspective. She let the moment belong to the players, but then her emotions took control.
Soon after, Lawson made her way into the stands, climbing up to embrace Duke legend and WNBA star Chelsea Gray and the supporters who had stayed with Duke through everything — not just this wild night, but the difficult beginning.
“They sat there when we were 3–6, too,” Lawson said. “And they supported us. It felt right to celebrate with them.”
In early December, the Blue Devils lost to LSU at home, 93–77. It was their sixth loss in nine games. It seemed their season was veering toward disaster. Instead, Lawson and her squad were stacking lessons.
Since then, they have gone 24–2.
They didn’t just improve. They steadied.
“When you’re aligned in your purpose … it allows you to just be so clear-minded,” Lawson said.
Clear enough to survive a blown lead. Clear enough to trust a player who was 1 of 7 from long range before that last play.
“My teammates and my coaches, they trust me and they believe in me,” said Jackson, who finished with 19 points. “That’s really all I needed.”
Ashlon Jackson and coach Kara Lawson share a moment of joy after the Blue Devils’ victory. (Harry How / Getty Images)
During the good times, trust is easy to acquire. It’s much harder during tense situations. But as Duke keeps proving, it knows itself.
The ball was uncertain. It rolled, teased, refused to decide. But the people who made that moment never wavered.
Not Jackson, launching again after the misses.
Not Lawson, brilliantly stoic.
Not a team that had lived an entire season full of setbacks and comebacks.
The ball hesitated. Duke didn’t. And so the Blue Devils are still playing. They’re one win from the Final Four, and to get there, they face one more reckoning against UCLA, a team that beat them by 30 back in November.
But this is March. Time bends. Moments refuse to behave. And pressure spins like a ball on the rim. It reveals and rewards the people who can stand steady when everything else swirls.
And there stands Lawson: calm, deliberate, eyes locked, arms folded, absorbing the noise, the chaos, the triumph and the lessons.
“I know I’m made for this,” said Lawson, back in the city where she played for seven WNBA seasons. “And I don’t think it. I know I am.”
Her team knows it, too.
And now, even the ball is a believer.